News

Understanding Investment Fund Management

Our online interactive and self-paced course Understanding Investment Fund Management is available through the Investment Association, £395 + VAT for non-members and £295 + VAT for members – click here for more information.

The course is made up of thirteen modules, including a randomly generated test, and takes around ten hours to study.

 

March 2023

Investment 2020

We will be delivering two mornings of pro bono training for around forty trainees from Investment20/20, the Investment Association initiative that seeks to increase diversity in the investment management sector, on 2 and 9 March at the Investment Association offices in London. One aim is that the training will reinforce the understanding they will already have gained from studying the modules of our online Understanding Investment Fund Management course, that covers the fundamentals of the market, to which we have also given them free access. The other is to explain what is involved in the new FCA Consumer Duty being implemented from the end of July this year.

 

February 2023

Coaching sessions

We’ve recently developed and delivered a series of short sessions for a global fund management firm which sets out the context and outlines the implications of the new Offshore Funds Regime governing the marketing of foreign retail funds in the UK; plus the implications of the UK’s ongoing requirement for use of the UCITS KIID instead of the PRIIPs KID, now required for EEA UCITS.

 

January 2023

An enjoyable return to Albania

We’ve enjoyed working in Albania again and visiting our old haunts (food-wise, Fiore is still living up to its high standards, we are glad to report!). We spent the first two weeks of December in Tirana delivering daily workshops for the Albanian Financial Supervisory Authority and market participants on the implications of the draft regulatory framework for capital markets which has been developed under Law No 62 of 2020 on Capital Markets – a law which we helped to draft under a previous Project.

 

October 2022

Specialist course for industry service providers

In September 2022 we worked with the Investment Association to develop and deliver a specially designed one-day in-house training course for around twenty staff of a technology service provider to the investment management sector. The focus was on achieving a general understanding of the key drivers of the sector; and a more detailed grasp of the processes involved in retail investment fund management.

 

May 2021

Enhancing mutual fund development

As part of a project we have been looking at measurements of success of mutual fund sectors and what makes domestic mutual funds markets successful in different countries and thinking about the contribution of two key factors – sales and performance. It turns out that countries can appear very successful in terms of growth in assets under management, but this may be due to performance (rise in value of underlying assets) rather than sales (attracting new money). Measuring success by mutual fund assets under management expressed as a percentage of GDP may also make one country’s domestic fund sector look as if it is growing more than it is: assuming two countries’ assets under management increase to the same degree, if the GDP of country A is not expanding fast, it will perform better on this measure than country B whose GDP is rising faster.

The USA is the biggest fund domestic market in the world but it ranks second to Australia on mutual fund assets under management expressed as a percentage of GDP. Australia’s scale is largely due to mandatory second pillar pensions using mutual funds as underlying investments. Retirement savings also play a major part in the US market.

But that leads on to another thought – if a fairly high proportion of a mutual fund sector invests in equities, as in Australia, the UK and the USA, then assets under management will rise (and fall) in line with equity markets which will make those markets expand (and contract) more than countries with larger money market and bond fund sectors, like Brazil.

The UK has been ‘living off the farm’ with rising assets under management due to rises in markets given the UK fund industry’s predominantly equity exposure but with new sales as a percentage of assets under management hardly growing at all.

We also been studying Malaysia, a success story, where unit trusts now form the basis of the nation’s non-bank savings with nearly two thirds of the population holding unit trust accounts either as part of their retirement savings or directly.

We have also charted the astonishing rise of China’s public funds industry where sales of funds have leapt from bank counters directly to mobile devices thanks to the money market fund Yu’e Bao, which started simply by paying a higher rate of interest that bank savings which were subject to a regulatory cap and offering access to this via Alipay. It became the largest money market fund in the world in 2017 thought it has since lost this crown. Chinese investors, having grown accustomed to this way of deploying their savings, are now accessing a wide range of other types of fund in the same way.

 

March 2021

New e-based interactive course on understanding retail fund management

We now have around a hundred users of our new Understanding Investment Fund Management course - many are from Investment20/20 to whom we have given a free trial as our contribution to improving diversity within the sector.

The course is not ‘chalk-and-talk’ moved online: it is fully interactive and is based on a professional learning management system provided by Can Studios: it covers all aspects of the retail fund management business, focusing mostly on open ended funds. 

Enhancing mutual fund development in India

We’re starting a project which will review the scale of the mutual fund market in India and assess how it could be expanded and improve penetration outside major cities.

 

January 2021

Our new e-based interactive course goes live

Over the last six months we’ve been working on reinventing our existing two day classroom course as an e-based fully interactive course and we are happy to say that as of January 2021 it is going live!

Designed with the needs of staff who are having to work from home and have less opportunity to learn from colleagues ‘on the job’ in mind, the course has five foundation modules and seven more technical modules covering areas such as investment, valuation, investor communications, charges and costs as well as the key drivers of the business as a whole.

Developing the investment fund sector in Vietnam

We’ve also been re-appointed by the World Bank to continue our work with the State Securities Commission of Vietnam on the development of the Vietnamese investment fund sector.